The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, it's the latest diet that everybody's talking about, the ketogenic diet, and there's so much to know that we're doing a two-part series, so listen up and prepare to learn the latest, plus later. We'll tell you what's going on around town. But first up, Marxism is the founder of primal kitchen foods, and the author of the number one best selling health food Dick on Amazon dot com, the keto reset diet, as well as the Primal Blueprint cookbook and the top rated health and fitness blog. Mark's daily apple dot com. And we welcome him to the mother's market radio show.

How are you?

I'm great, thanks for having me today.

Why don't you fill our audience in a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to the show's topic... Well, My mission is simply to change the way the world eats, more specifically, I've been delving into the science of nutrition for 30 years, and have had some insights over those years into how we can use food to alter our health, how we can manipulate gene expression if you will to create strong, lean, Fit, happy, healthy, productive bodies as opposed to decrepit declining... Low energy, depressed bodies.

So the mission has been one of educating, first and foremost, so I have a website, Mark's daily apple that's been around for over 11 years now, and on that website, I talk about all the things that I've discovered in the world of science and the research. These hidden genetics switches that we all have that we can access through choices that we make, behavioral choices, the types of food we eat, the amount of sleep we get, the amount of sun exposure we get, the amount of play that we allow ourselves to have and all these things affect how our genes express themselves and how our genes basically rebuild... Recreate us on a day-to-day basis.

So in the last several years, as I've gotten more and more into the science of food, I realize that people wanna enjoy what they eat, they wanna have great tasting meals, and they wanna... Food is one of the great pleasures of life, and the idea that we would have to consider sacrificing and all this discipline in all this negative connotation and context that goes with dieting or trying to eat right. It just didn't sit well with me, and so I created a line of products, sauces, dressings, toppings and things like that, that you could put on otherwise healthy, but sometimes bland food to make it taste really good.

Wow. Well, it sounds exciting. And today we're talking about the Keto diet, of course. And to mark, lately, we've been hearing a lot about this buzz about the ketogenic diet. Can you explain keto?

Well, yeah, you're hearing a lot of buzz about it because it works, the ketogenic diet is simply a way of eating that encourages your body to derive more energy from fat as opposed to relying on carbohydrate for fuel throughout the day, and the ketogenic diet is just a sort of a next level way of eating beyond a traditional kind of low carb diet, so when you realize that you probably would be better off cutting out simple sugars and sweetened beverages and cakes, candies, pies, cookies, and all the things that I think we probably all know that we ought not to meeting so much of... You come down to a diet that is fairly low carb, but it still has enough carbohydrate in the form of vegetables, or say potatoes and tubers and things like that, or whole grains that is low in carbs but isn't low enough in carbs to really prompt your body to burn fat.

So while the low carb diet and the way I've been preaching for the last 15 years about this paleo primal ancestral way of eating by cutting out all the crap, if you will, it's a very efficient way of meeting, there's yet another level that we can get to and that's the ketogenic diet.

So I wrote a book called The Keto reset diet with the idea that everybody would be well served by spending some amount of time in ketosis, not just once in a while, but maybe once a year or for several weeks a year, to kind of reset... Re-tune their metabolism. The idea behind the ketogenic diet is you derive more energy from that, whether that's the fate, your plate, whether that's the fat on your body, you become metabolically flexible, and what that means is that you get energy from whatever substrate or energy source is available to you at that time, as I say, it could be food on your plate, it could be food on your body, could be carbohydrates on your plate, could be food on your body could be fat on your plate, could be fat on your body, could be carbohydrates on your plate, it could be glycogen in your muscles, could be the ketones that your body is making, so you become this metabolically efficient beast that never runs out of energy, the alternative... In modern societies, we've become so dependent on carbohydrates that all we do is eat more and more carbs, and the carbs generate short-term energy, but we don't have a long-term benefit from it, and as we run out of carbs, we get hungry again, we have to eat more carbs, body can't store much carbohydrate because it's just... It's not the way we're designed, so the theory behind keto is we were able to store so much fat to a fault in most cases, that we have all this great energy source that we're carrying around with us all day long, all this wonderful fuel. We just have to re-learn how to burn it, how to access it every minute of every day, so that's really what the ketogenic diet is about.

Interesting, but it's been your personal experience on the Keto diet... Yeah, so again, I've talking about low-carb eating and cleaning up your diet for a long time for 15, 20 years, and I've had great results, I have all the energy I want, I maintain my muscle mass, I don't get sick, I don't get hungry, I get hungry but I don't get ravenous the way a lot of people do, and so I thought everything was Cotati and I was gonna live the rest of my life that way, just eating kind of a clean up, cleaned up, low-carb diet. And a couple of years ago, I've been writing about in my blog about people who were spending a lot of time on this ketogenic diet and really cutting the carbs down to 15 to 50 grams of carbs a day, but they were getting amazing benefits, and because I'm a sort of a scientist and a researcher, and like to experiment, I thought I'd do a deep dive into ketosis, ketogenic and see what was there for me, and it was pretty... It was pretty transformative, I got to a next level. My body fat, which was already quite low, if I do say so myself, got lower, I put on a little bit more lean muscle, I had more energy. I noticed, probably most significantly that my appetite diminished to the point that it would have concerned me, but for the fact that I realized that that's really one of the benefits of this whole keto program as you become so flexible, so metabolically flexible and efficient that you drive more energy from fewer calories, and so I found that I could take in 30% fewer calories in a day and still maintain muscle mass to have the energy and not get sick and not get hungry.

And as I looked at that, I thought, Jesus, Wow, that's an amazing concept that people could become more efficient at what they eat and eat less, and as long as they didn't get hungry, 'cause that's the key, this is not about starving, it's not about forcing yourself, not this is about just controlling your... And being so good at accessing your own body fat stores that your body is always able to get energy from you from a closed system without having to take in exiting the feedings.

So as I looked further and further into this and I realized that some of the science behind this keto reset would be that you increase the number of mitochondria in all of your cells, but particularly in your muscle, mitochondria is where the Fat burns, so the more mitochondria you have the more fat you can put through your energy-producing system, and the less you have to rely on regular feedings of glucose or carbohydrates is, again, a very... It's an elegant adaptation that we've evolved over millions of years, if you think about it, humans are wired to overeat, we're always trying to fight that little voice that says, Come on, you can have more... You can eat more, so we're wired to overeat from evolution, because for most of our history there was no regular source of food, so you came across a source of food and the brain goes, Well, let's just not only eat enough for one meal, let's eat enough to store the extra calories as fuel on our body because there might not be fuel for our food for another two, three days, four days, whatever.

So we have this elegant, beautiful system that takes excess calories and convert it to fat, it's really a cool system, except we haven't learned how to take it out and burn it, and in order to do that, you have to create the environment where your genes are saying Okay, there's not gonna be a lot of carbohydrate, there's not gonna be a lot of glucose... What do we do? We go to plan B, plan B is we upregulated enzyme systems that take that out of storage and combust it, we increase the number of mitochondria, which is where the Fat burns, we increase the efficiency of those mitochondria, and we do some other really cool things like we start cleaning house in the cells, so when I go undergo a ketogenic way of eating and I decide I'm gonna cut back a little bit on the amount or maybe significantly on the amount of carbohydrates I'm taking in, and then we've cut back on calories every once in a while, I'm gonna skip a meal or two, and if I skip that meal, that's when the body goes, Alright, I'm gonna burn fat, I got that handled. I'm gonna make ketones and I'm gonna use that to fuel the brain, and because there's no food around and this is a scarce environment, I'm going to actually start to consume as a cell, consume some of the damaged proteins, damaged fats within the call. I'm gonna do some house cleaning, I'm literally gonna repair some of the damage that's accumulated through my excessive ways up to now, by literally house cleaning some of the cells, so there's a whole realm of ketogenic science that looks at the anti-aging benefits of that.

Well, you just said anti-aging. Yes, I am interested in how was this research different than what you knew before, it's not different, it's just... It's an extension of what I knew before. So it's next level stuff. As we say, like I said, I could have stayed where I was and for the rest of my life been completely happy and healthy and productive, and all the things I talk about, but I am a person who... I'm always looking for like, Okay, what's a little bit better? What's the next thing? What can I do to improve my metabolism, increase my energy levels, maybe incorporate some of these anti-aging strategies into what I'm doing a little bit more, so for me, it was just about kind of always wanting to get to the next level of health or fitness or whatever.

Now, how that applies to even if you might... A listener might be someone who's not into performance or sports or whatever, or even into... Maybe not even into looking good naked, just looking into wanting to be healthier, keto has been very transformative and revolutionary in Revelation ARY for a lot of people who are who have plateaued in their efforts to achieve better health through their traditional methods.

So there are a lot of people who are using KETO now to improve their metabolic efficiency to the extent that they might even get off their meds, they might get off their type 2 diabetes meds, or they might decrease inflammation to the point that they don't need... The NSAIDS on a regular basis anymore.

There are a lot of other sort of ancillary benefits besides just losing body fat and burning off your stored body fat, Well, this is all very interesting information, and right now we need to take a quick break, so more in just a moment. Don't go away. We will be right back.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show.

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And now back to our interview with Primal kitchens, Mark system, and we're talking about the Keto diet, and so Mark, what are some of the misconceptions about the keto diet?

Well, part the biggest misconception is that it's unhealthy.

There's been, over the years, the term ketoacidosis has been banned about, and it's a condition that happens to type 1 diabetics, and I would say raging alcoholics who have liver issues, but it's basically a situation where the body builds up more ketones in ICI process and create an acidic environment in type 1 diabetics, the issue is not having any... Because by nature, type 1 diabetics do not make insulin, that's a situation that would arise under certain eating conditions, combined with certain fasting conditions, combined with not having enough insulin available in every other person, the availability of insulin, because insulin turns off ketosis, so it's an elegant little system that monitors the levels of ketones in the blood, and if they get too high, then insulin is secreted and that's the end of that and it doesn't rise too high, so the danger has been way overstated, and it's in a very select small population of people who are not... Well, to begin with, otherwise, I think misconception about keto is that it's not sustainable, and I know people who've been keto for 10 years and love it and prefer that condition and stay there, and I think... I'm not suggesting that everyone do that, I'm suggesting people experiment with keto for a couple of weeks or a couple of months at a time, because every time you embark on this keto... I call it the keto zone, but every time you get into this keto zone where you've cut carbs way down for a long period of time, days or weeks or even months, the body does have that ability to adapt and create more mitochondria to burn more fat to increase the number of enzymes involved in taking fat out of storage, all these adaptations take place over time, and even when you stop using KETO, when you get out of ketosis, when you increase the number of carbs, you don't lose those benefits, they don't go away because you've done this genetic manipulation by sending these signals to your body, so I live in a place where I call... I metaphorically, I actually live in Miami, but I live in a place... Or I call what I call the keto zone, and that is because I've done the work and I do it regularly. I go deep keto for weeks at a time, sometimes months at a time, but then I come out for a long period of time, so I can have one day where I might have 30 grams of carbs total for the entire day, feel great.

Another day where I might have 175 grams of carbs. Feel great, never notice the difference one way or the other from one day to the next, because I've built that metabolic flexibility, I'm able to extract energy from any source of calories that my body has access to, and that's a really, again, a very empowering position to be in to be able to know that you can always get fuel from stored body fat, you can always eat because food is everywhere, but if you don't eat... If you, let's say I hop on a plane and I don't have breakfast at high fly all day, I get to where I'm going, it's late at night, I don't eat dinner, I don't notice, it's literally, it's almost a... There's a mental clarity and a benefit that happens that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten had I eaten meals now, in the old days when I was what we call a sugar burner, when I was one who was constantly dependent on carbohydrate and loading up those carbohydrate stores and storing that glycogen, if I skipped one meal, I would get angry and I got... But I skipped two meals, I'd be... I pass out.

So I developed the skill and it's available to anyone, because this genetic recipe exists in all of us to be really good at accessing stored body fat, burn that fat for fuel, not have to eat on a regular basis.

To the extent that a lot of people who are in keto or live in was what I call the keto zone, my day looks like this, I get up in the morning, I have a cup of coffee. Basically, it would be black coffee, except I color it a little bit with heavy cream.

I don't eat until 1-30 in the afternoon, so my first meal every day is around 10 and 130, and then I have a second meal, which is dinner around 7 or 7-30, so I eat in what we call a compressed eating window. So there's 18 hours at least, sometimes more throughout the day that I don't eat at all, that's when all the good stuff is happening in my body, that's what all the repairs happening, that's what all the fat-burning is happening, that's when all the muscle building is happening, that's when any workout that I've done here and I do all my workouts fasted, I don't eat before the workout and I don't need after the workout, and that's where all the benefits of the workout really accrue because the body knows enough to create a pulse of growth hormone and testosterone after, say, a hard lifting work out well, if you eat a meal right after that workout, particularly one of the tie and carbs, you blunt, that growth hormone and that testosterone effect. So you're sort of blending the intended effect of the workout, so one of the... I think the major kind of commonalities and themes among people who are keto is three meals a day is just too damn much food, it's not like I couldn't eat it, it's like it's uncomfortable to eat it, so I only eat two meals a day. I think you'll find that very common throughout the keto world, some people are Keto, do a regular 30 to 36-hour fast, so they'll dinner one night and they won't eat the next day at all, and they have breakfast on the following day as a regular part of their strategy and they report more energy, better mental clarity. The misconception in the old day, 'cause we're talking about misconceptions here would have been that If you go that long without eating, you lose muscle mass, you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue, that was the old mantra that the body builders had and the whole health world had back in the day, not too long ago, where it was assumed that humans were grazers and you had multiple small meals spread evenly throughout the day, you had to carry your top of war around with you, and if you were a body builder that... We get up at 430 and have a protein shake and then have a breakfast of egg whites and then have a mid-morning snack after your work out, and then I have a lunch and then have a mid-afternoon to that, 'cause there was just fear that you were going to be cannibalizing muscle tissue if you went too long without getting some form of carbohydrate, that misconception has long since been debunked, and now there are a lot of body builders, there are even sites dedicated to ketogenic body building, so called keto games, for instance, very popular, and it shows people how to maximize body building on a ketogenic diet, and so who do you feel can benefit or find the most success with the keto diet?

That's such a broad question, because I would say everyone listening would be well served by trying the keto experiment and seeing how you feel, particularly people who have maybe plateaued in their weight loss efforts, they're struggling, they had initial success and now they found that the gains or the results are not happening anymore, people who have had inflammation issues, whether it's polycystic ovarian syndrome or arthritis, or just joint pain or tendonitis or whatever, I think... It would be well served doing a keto reset. In other words, doing this, I have a book called The Keto readied, and in that book, I stair step people into a very comfortable process where they start to eliminate certain types of carbs and they have to earn the right to go keto halfway through the book and if you haven't met some of these qualifications, you can't go to, you can, but it's just gonna be... Not as pleasant, right?

I think that there are a lot of endurance athletes who would, if they took a year and really dug deeply into keto, would improve their performances dramatically because endurance athletes are a class of people who have historically relied on glycogen reserves, they're carbo-loading the whole time every day after a workout, they have the Carola to refill their glycogen so they can go out and train heart again tomorrow, and the next day and the next day, once you become keto-adapted and fat-adapted and your body starts becoming really good at driving energy from fat not just when you're walking around or at rest, but when you're actually doing 885, 90% of max capacity work.

So we have world class endurance athletes, particularly the more profound this is, so 100 mile racers who are running six minute, 30-second miles and getting 95% of their energy from fat, so they don't have to drink these gels or these liquid sugar concoction during their races, they don't have to... Carola, and they're also reporting that they recover from training better because the inflammatory nature of a high carb diet not only manifest itself in the average person, but if you can imagine a person who's running 100 miles a week and doing all of this repetitive motion stuff, which is an inflammatory in and of itself, now you add an inflammatory high carb, high sugar diet to it, that's where people get injured, and that was what kept me literally from competing in the 1980 Olympic trials. I qualified to the 1980 Olympic trials, but I was so inflamed and I had so many ties from arthritis and my osteoarthritis of my feet to tennis in my hips that I just, I couldn't train nearly at the level they needed to anymore.

Wow, is it different? Can you tell me, for men or women, and the effect it has on our bodies... Here's a new concept, men and women are different.

Hormonally, to a certain extent, there's a lot of... There are certainly a lot of similarities in how we process food, how we store fat and we burn fat, build muscle, men and women are very similar, but the extent to which we do that differs and largely because of the influence and hormones have on...

So men have more testosterone, so they build much, a little bit easier, women who are in child-bearing, of child-bearing age tend to maybe store fat lit bit easier for purposes of evolution and survival.

So the answer is, Yeah, keto does work for both men and women, it works... I'd say, I know women who just swear by it are gonna live it the rest of their lives, I think it's a great thing that ever happened. I've also met women who've struggled getting the same benefits from keto that their husbands have gotten far more easily, but a lot of this has to do also not just with male, female, but with your age... With your metabolic history, have you had a history of 50 years of doing metabolic damage yourself by just not exercising appropriately and eating really, really poor choices? Have you had gut biome issues, have you been on antibiotics and destroyed your gut by Oman because there are elements of keto that we talk about in the book that have to address dysbiosis in the gut, for instance, so everyone's... Again, we all share this genetic recipe that has the ability to do certain functions, it's just a degree to which we do those functions that vary among individuals, and that's a result of your parents, your parents contributed your gene set, and they might have some what we call snips, some single nucleotide polymorphisms that are different, that cause you to make a little bit more of one enzyme and a little bit less of another enzyme.

So I say, we treat all of this diet exploration as an experiment of an equals one is what we talk about here, and so try something... Experiment with it to see how you like it. If it works for you, great, keep doing it, and if it doesn't work for you and move on to the next thing, Well, all great information. Very interesting, and thank you so very much, Mark, for your time and some great advice, and we really appreciate your knowledge and look forward to having you on again the next time. Get more information on Mark, and the website is primal kitchen dot com, learn more and maybe pick up that book. We look forward to our next visit.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show, and for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen, mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition,